Archive for the ‘Inside CS-Cart’ Category

In CS-Cart Multi-Vendor, our eCommerce marketplace builder, each vendor has their money balance. From this balance, they can pay for the vendor plans. Vendor plans are a convenient tool offering vendors different features at different pricing. Admins use them to automatically withdraw money from vendor balance on a regular basis.

But if a vendor sales are not very good, the vendor can’t keep a positive balance paying for a vendor plan regularly. And the vendor becomes your debtor. For now, you have to manually root out debtors and convince them to pay you. In Multi-Vendor 4.8.1, this won’t be a problem—a new Vendor Debt Payout feature will block a debtor’s vendor panel automatically and let them pay the debt through the marketplace checkout.

In this video, we’re explaining, how Vendor Debt Payout works and what problems it solves:

You are welcome to discuss Vendor Debt Payout in the comments here or on YouTube: share your opinion and ideas on how to improve this function.

More eCommerce articles, vids, and infographics are coming soon. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter not to miss them!

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Today, I’d like to tell you about some cool new features to land in our next major release, CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.2. These goodies will bring more user- and SEO-friendliness to CS-Cart, to help your business bloom and your profits grow.

Since these features have been suggested by the members of our awesome community, we are extremely happy to include them in our software.

Responsive Design

Making CS-Cart’s storefront more mobile-friendly was suggested in April 2013, back when CS-Cart 3 was the latest major version and the visual framework behind our storefront was 960.gs.

A lot has changed since then. We’ve switched to Twitter Bootstrap, which has made it much easier to develop a responsive storefront theme, and we’re happy to announce that CS-Cart 4.2 will play well with screens of all sizes.

Google’s Rich Snippets

You’ve probably seen those little chunks of text under every Google search result. They’re called “snippets,” and they help users better understand what a particular site is about and why it’s relevant to their search term.

If you mark up your webpage in a certain way, Google can go further and create a rich snippet—a special widget that will show detailed information specific to your page. For example, a product page can contain its rating and reviews. This information can be shown in a rich snippet.

Adding the support of rich snippets in CS-Cart was suggested long ago, and we’re happy to finally implement it in our next major version.

Improved SEO Name Policy

As for now, if an item in your store has an SEO name, this name must be unique across the whole catalog and across all types of items. Some users have reasonably pointed out, however, that this behavior can be somewhat restricting.

For example, currently, you can’t have two subcategories with the same SEO name—even if they are in different categories—because the resulting URLs would be unique (e.g., mystore.com/men/pants and mystore.com/women/pants).

Starting with version 4.2, the SEO name policy will be improved to allow duplicate SEO names; only the whole URL will have to be unique.

UPD: Automatic Canonical URLs to Avoid Duplicate Pages

Another great improvement in our SEO add-on in version 4.2 are automatically generated canonical URLs. This info will help Google and other search providers avoid duplicating pages during indexation.

E.g, mystore.com/pants and mystore.com/pants?size=M will be considered the same page, not two different ones.

The 301 Status Page Redirection

CS-Cart 4.2 will introduce an easier way to move a product, category, or page from one URL to another. Using the standard 301 HTTP status, your store will be able to seamlessly redirect a visitor to the new item location, as suggested in our UserVoice.

You are very welcome to share your ideas about how to improve CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor. If you happen to find a bug, please report in on our bug tracker.

Stay tuned to our Twitter and Facebook, as well as our YouTube channel, for the latest news about CS-Cart software.

In this post, we’d like to tell you about a new and more convenient way to translate CS-Cart. We present to you CS-Cart Translator—a brand new tool for collaborative translations for the CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor software.

Why?

In short, it’s because we love our clients. Our clients come from 170+ countries around the world. We want our software to be easy to use for anyone, and in their native language. This is why having a robust and convenient translation tool is so important—it’s our key to better customer service.

Previously, introducing a new language to CS-Cart meant that some contributor would take the full responsibility of translating all text in CS-Cart. Then, that person would submit an SQL dump for the CS-Cart team to validate and include in the next CS-Cart version. If there were errors, we would return the dump to the contributor and ask them for a correction. The contributor would resubmit the translation, and the process would repeat until no more errors were found..

If that sounds complicated, it’s only because it is. Apart from that, there was no reliable way to verify the translation quality for some languages (nobody in our office speaks Greek or Chinese, for example).

With the new CS-Cart Translator, contributing to a CS-Cart translation is much easier. Now, anybody can add a new translation for a particular text bit or correct an existing one right in the browser. No more messing with SQL or needing to have a special CS-Cart installation just for translating. All you need to use CS-Cart Translator is an account on the CS-Cart Community Forums.

All submitted translation suggestions will be regularly checked by native-speaking validators, and every new CS-Cart & Multi-Vendor release will include the latest approved translations. You can also download the latest translation for any available language in the .po format right from the project website (switch to the language and click Export at the bottom of the page). A downloaded .po file can be imported into CS-Cart or Multi-Vendor 4.0.2 and later.

By the way, we plan to give free licenses annually to validators and most active contributors, so get involved!

This project has just been released, and there will surely be lots of room for improvement. This is where we need your help. Feel free to share your opinion and suggestions here in the comments section.

We also encourage willing contributors to apply for a validator status, which will give you the right to approve (or disapprove) and edit the submitted translation suggestions. Also, your own translation variants will be approved by default. If you’re interested in becoming a validator, contact us at sales@cs-cart.com.